Consumer Guide Album

Mahmoud Ahmed: Ere Mela Mela [Crammed Discs, 1986]
Because taste leads to knowledge, I enjoy fair familiarity with the West African music that's second cousin to rock and roll and none with the distant relatives in North Africa and the Middle East. But where knowledge ends, taste rules. Ahmed is a singer of unmistakable authority, and maybe an album of the "many standards" he's contributed to "modern Ethiopian music" would expand my horizons. Or maybe this is that album--I don't know. I do know that soon I lose the charge I get from the lead cuts, generated less by the "strange, almost Indonesian-sounding scales" of the vocals than by the two-sax horn section, which (maybe because it utilizes those scales) could be Afro-Brilliant Corners or ill-tempered synthesizer or avant-garde blues. For tastes that run to the Master Musicians of Jajouka and Om Kalsoum, he may be Elvis. B+